Children of Men

James Joyce once observed that “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” But what if existence were even worse than Joyce imagined? What if we lived in a present with no hope of a future, one where human history was about to end? Would reality become a nightmare from which there was no awakening?

These are questions the director, Alfonso Cuaron, asks in his brilliant movie, “The Children of Men.” Set in a dystopian near future, the film follows the life of Theo, a former political activist and now disaffected bureaucrat who lives in the London of 2027. Powerfully portrayed by a suitably dour Clive Owens, Theo lives in a childless world where women have been infertile since 2009. Because the end of human history is seemingly near, Theo and virtually everyone else have abandoned all hope.

Cuaron’s greatest strength as a director is his ability to evoke compassion. He seems to understand that compassion arises from what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls the Aristotelian “acknowledgement that one has possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to those of the sufferer.” That is, perhaps, why Cuaron masterfully creates a dystopian Britain of 2027 that is disturbingly similar to our world. The main difference is that the ideological battleground in the movie is Britain, not Iraq. London has become modern-day Baghdad, while the rest of the world has become far worse.

In this manner, the movie looks to the future to confirm our worst political fears of the present. We feel compassion for the characters in the movie because we understand their present may become our horrifying future. In sum and substance, they are a chilling representation of what the world would be like “if” the destabilizing turmoil

present in the Middle East did become the future state of the world.

At first, Cuaron brilliantly interweaves the seeming hopelessness of his dystopia into the fabric of Theo’s life. As Theo rides home on the subway, there is graffiti that says “Last One To Die–Please Turn Off The Lights.” And as he awakens, there is an advertisement for Quietus, a painless suicide drug that alludes to Hamlet’s tortured reflections on suicide (Shall I make my “quietus with a bare bodkin?”). However, Cuaron’s dystopia transforms the profound moral implications of assisted suicide (think Jack Kevorkian) into nothing more than a politically engineered palliative for hopelessness.

Deprived of a future, we learn humanity lost hope when it was denied the purpose of common historical development. British television shows pictures of a world in flames, as it gravely intones: “The world has collapsed…Only Britain soldiers on.” But even Britain is an embattled political state where terrorists are as contemptibly violent as the government is ruthlessly brutal. Capturing resonant images of terrorizing fear, unexpected bombings, ransacked buildings, and Abu Ghraib-type abuse, the movie powerfully evokes despair, as these images recall current news footage and photography of the Middle East. Terrorists bomb cafés and execute innocents, while the government’s “Homeland Security” imprisons illegal immigrants, or “fugees,” in squalid concentration camps.

Through Theo we experience the unexpected shock of random bombings, the gripping fear of building-to-building urban warfare in the rabble of a fallen city, and the gruesome carnage of war. A once politically free England has become a virtual prison where illegal immigrants are caged like animals in detention cells on public streets and citizens ride on public transportation behind barred windows.

Meanwhile, the rich live in a social bubble, where people like Theo’s cousin Nigel (played by the excellent Danny Huston) exist in a kind of Victorian fantasy world on Prozac, one that seems blissfully oblivious to the turmoil that lies outside its heavily guarded gates.. Nigel is a powerful government official who collects masterpieces of art to preserve the past for a future that may never exist. As Theo is ushered into his cousin’s foyer, he sees Michelangelo’s David with the calf of one leg disturbingly missing. Picasso’s Guernica, serves as the dramatic backdrop of Theo and his cousin’s lunch conversation. However, Theo’s cousin is so numb to life that not even the beauty of Michelangelo’s Renaissance sculpture and the stirring violence of Picasso’s depiction of the Spanish Civil War break the cocoon of his pill enhanced nihilism. Nor do they fill him with compassion for those who lead a less politically privileged life than he does. Nonetheless, these works of timeless art do foreshadow a new Renaissance that will provide hope, notwithstanding the brewing civil uprising in Britain the terrorist group the Fish wishes to foment.

The movie dramatizes this new birth through an intriguing conjunction of chance and faith. By chance, Theo meets Kee, a young black woman and a “fugee,” who is well-played by Claire-Hope Ashitey. When Kee tells Theo she is miraculously pregnant, she restores Theo’s faith in the future. This joining of faith to chance seems odd at first, especially since religious faith is normally connected to the divine order of Providence. However, in Cuaron’s film there exists no discernible divine order. Animals burn in fields without narrative explanation, pollution mysteriously flows from pipes, and women are infertile for no apparent reason. Even when things are explicable, they often result in senseless political violence such as the dramatic death of Julian, the radiant Julianne Moore character, who is Theo’s former wife and the leader of the Fish whom her comrades execute for the ‘crime’ of being too peaceful.

While the movie may not be strictly religious, it does connect chance to faith in a profoundly meaningful way. For example, Kee reveals her pregnancy to Theo in a manger that, of course, alludes to the birth of Jesus. Further, in the film’s most dramatic scene, the crying of Kee’s new born baby temporarily halts a fierce battle in the refugee camp. Both the Fish terrorists and the British soldiers stare in reverent awe at Kee, as if she were a modern Madonna carrying the baby who might redeem human history. By thus conjoining the death of war to the potential rebirth of history, Cuaron demonstrates how history and political order rest on a fragile balance between hate and hope.

Cuaron decidedly avoids the imprimatur of an orthodox religious message. Kee even refutes the religious connotation behind the miracle of her birth by jokingly telling an initially dumbfounded and then bemused Theo she is a virgin. Indeed, in entitling the film “Children of Men” and not “Children of God,” the “fallen” state of society is a punishment man imposes on his self, not one that can be redeemed by the child of God. In this manner, the movie satirizes fundamentalist religious groups that regard the collapse of civilization as punishment by God for the sins of man.

For Cuaron, we create our future in the political decisions we make, whether they relate to energy, immigration, war, civil liberties, or homeland security. In a personal statement on the official website for the film, he said that, in directing “Children of Men,” he “didn’t want to do a film about the future…but about how the circumstances today can create the future.” Though this kind of sentiment might have led to a political agenda, Cuaron carefully avoids advocating a particular political view in his film.

While Cuaron deals with political issues such as immigration and terrorism in the film, he largely avoids the trap of political partisanship. He does not champion the terrorist, the citizen, the bureaucrat, or the soldier. Instead, he says his film is “more about ideologies coming between people’s judgments and their actions.” Cuaron’s point, it seems, is that people use ideology to objectify and dehumanize their enemies. As they do, they forfeit the ability to find faith and hope even amidst the random chance and radical disruptions of life.